When new
communication technologies become accessible to many, this may have tremendous
impact on society: social bonds change and re-arrange massively both in
quantity and quality, leading to potentially massive changes in social dynamics
and eventually society. This is especially true for the new possibilities
currently opening through the combination of internet, DIY technologies, smart
devices, computer games, and new media. At this workshop we discuss the new
technologies and their impacts on science, how it might change, and how it will
be taught. We discuss novel ideas to use the new technology in knowledge
production and dissemination. We show already realized accomplishments in the
field of crowd sourcing scientific knowledge production such as scientific
discovery games, that involve the interaction and coordination of people
through online platforms. With these platforms it becomes possible for the
first time to understand the processes of knowledge production on a
quantitative basis.

Please
find your way from the hotel to Hauptbahnhof. From Hauptbahnhof (Vienna Main
Train station) follow the bus signs to the exit Bus
Terminal/Laxenburgerstrasse. The bus ticket costs €2.00 one way and
departs roughly every 30 minutes. The trip takes 35 minutes. The
buses will indicate either Laxenburg or Eisenstadt as their destination, but
check with the driver whether the bus you are boarding is going to Laxenburg.
You should get off in Laxenburg (klick
for foto) at the stop called Franz-Josefs-Platz. The main entrance of the
IIASA Schloss is indicated on the center of the map and is about a 2-minute
walk from the bus stop. (See Timetable). For
arrivinf well in time please take the bus leaving the Bus terminal at 08:55. If
you come directly from the airport, take a cab. The drivers will know about
Laxenburg and IIASA. Trip is about €30. Cab from the airport to the city is by
meter and will be about €40. From the hotel to the airport please let the hotel
guys help you to make sure that you pay a fixed rate not exceeding €36.
Also there is good public transport to the city center (train €4), or CAT
(private train €11).

Lunches

Lunch will be served
at the Schloss Restaurant. We walk there together after the

Invited speakers get
a voucher, other participants get a low-price lunch (about €5).

Dinner

We meet Palmenhaus,
at 20:00

Palmenhaus is in the
heart of the city of Vienna.

Burggarten 1, 1010
Vienna. Invited speakers are will get a voucher. For all others who wish to
join, dinner will be 40 EUR.

For most of you Anita
booked a room at hotel Favorita, Laxenburger Str. 8-10, 1100 Vienna.
Should there be any problem, please mention that your reservation was done by
the Medical University of Vienna through Anita Wanjek. For those of you who
were not in contact with Anita about a hotel booking there will not be a room
reserved.

Interconnected techno-social systems have an increasingly
pervasive influence on our culture and everyday life. There is now overwhelming
evidence that the current organisation of our economies and societies is
seriously damaging biological ecosystems and human living conditions in the
very short term, with potentially catastrophic effects in the long term. With a
growing realisation that only through bottom-up actions we can deal with
today's challenges, there is an urgent need to create an ICT fabric that can
support the local actions of citizens by supporting collaborative monitoring,
exposing actionable local information, and enabling an evidence-based dialogue
among stakeholders. Nowadays low-cost sensing technologies allow the citizens
to directly assess the state of the environment; social networking tools allow
effective data and opinion collection and real-time information spreading
processes. At the same time in the last few years the Web has progressively
acquired the status of an infrastructure for social computation that allows
researchers to coordinate the cognitive abilities of human agents in on-line
communities so to steer the collective user activity towards predefined goals.
This general trend is also triggering the adoption of web-games as a very
interesting laboratory to run experiments in the social sciences and whenever
the contribution of human beings is crucially required for research purposes.
In this talk I'll review some of the progresses I have witnessed in the last
few years in the framework of the EveryAware project, whose goal is to enhance
social awareness about environmental issues emerging in urban habitats. I'll
discuss several case studies about Noise and Air pollution as well as
Experimental Tribe, a general purpose platform for Web-gaming and social
computation.

Steffen Fritz

Using gaming and
crowdsourcing to collect essential land cover and land use data

There are many
decisions being made by policies which affect citizens’ daily lives, from
introducing high speed fiber-optic Internet cables, to building a new motorway
that passes through a residential area. Traditional decision making tools
proved to be incapable to foresee the impact of innovations processes given the
complexity of the environments in which they are deploying, creating in this
manner unpredictable social, economic and environmental consequences. As a
result, the society we’re living in is endangered by these unpredictable - and
sometimes not even perceptible at first - side effects of innovation. To
prevent the proliferation of these byproducts, traditional decision making
tools have been recently coupled with some forms of civic consultations.
Nevertheless, when it happens that citizens are encouraged to participate into
decision making processes, this is done mainly through “old-fashioned” means of
interactions, i.e. surveys, town hall meetings, etc. Real debates among agents
can hardly be grasped and then used to inform the decision making process, as
most of these forms of civic consultations are one-way communications from
agents (or groups of agents) to project designers/initiators. Moreover, civic
consultation is still perceived as the preliminary stage of a process that will
later propel autonomously towards defined goals, without further continuing the
interaction with citizens as the process goes on. However, a new approach to
innovation processes design and evaluation, called Dynamic Evaluation (DE), is
being developed by the EU funded research project Emergence by Design (MD)1.
The DE is a methodology that aims at providing constant feedbacks to project
initiators and designers, as well as to all the people and organizations affected
by these projects, about the transformations and changes that are occurring in
the agents-artifacts space2 that the projects seek to transform. The DE brings
into focus the need for a new approach to evaluation, specifically designed for
innovative settings, where goals and directions are emergent and constantly
changing, rather than being pre-determined and fixed. The ultimate aim of the
Dynamic Evaluation is to increasingly include in the evaluation activity all
the participants affected by an innovation project, in order to raise the
sensitivity of the agents about unwanted side effects, improve their
self-awareness and help them to better control the innovation process. The
research challenge MD is now facing is how to create effective feedback loops capable
to engage agents affected by the project in the evaluation process. In this
respect, how can concepts such as Gamification and Crowdsourcing contribute to
improve the effectiveness of these loops? How through ICTs can we engage
citizens in taking control of the innovation processes that will ultimately
have an impact on their communities?

Antoine Tesniére

Serious games for
medical training: combining content, technology and gaming

Anna Chmiel

Collective
emotions in online data and negative emotions as a discussion fuel

E-communities
are an object of interdisciplinary research. Similar to real-world encounters,
Internet communication may not only include factual information but also the
emotional component. We have shown a collective character of affective
phenomena on a large scale as observed in four million posts downloaded from
Blogs, Digg and BBC Forums. To test whether the emotions of a community member
may influence the emotions of others, posts were grouped into clusters of
messages with similar emotional valences. The frequency of long clusters was
much higher than it would be if emotions occurred at random. Distributions of
cluster sizes can be explained by preferential processes, because the
conditional probabilities for consecutive messages grow as a power with cluster
size. The empirical study of user activity in online BBC discussion forums
allows us to observe a special role of negative emotions. The level of negative
emotions in the entire forum boosts users activity, i.e. participants with more
negative emotions write more posts. At the level of individual threads users
that are more active in a specific thread tend to express more negative
emotions and seem to be the key agents sustaining threads discussions. As a
result, longer threads possess more negative emotional content.

Bosiljka Tadic

Self-Organization and
networking in online chats with users, agents and bots: A paradigm of new
information dynamics

Self-organized
self-driven stochastic processes underlying user communications on Web
platforms, where a large amount of the world population shares information and
knowledge via social contacts and networking, may have far reaching
consequences both for science and society. Apart from these key concerns which
require long-term research and multidisciplinary approaches, science methods
are required to study these processes themselves. Specifically, physics
theory of collective dynamical phenomena in synergy with methods of computer
science offers proper analysis of the contents in the empirical data of user
dynamics, and understanding their role in the course of processes; based
on such analysis, advanced socially intelligent information systems can be
designed (with possibly desired impact on science and/or society). In
this presentation, we will briefly comment on key features and potentials of
this approach using the example of empirical data from
Internet-Relayed-Chats (online chats from Ubuntu channel) and agent-based
modeling. In particular, we will demonstrate how ad hoc contacts in which
knowledge and emotion are shared can lead to social networking and collective
behaviors of users. In addition, this approach reveals that including
suitably designed Bots (Web robots) may alter the states of the system, making
it susceptive to emotion (and information) processing.

Online (or virtual)
citizen science projects are part of a growing trend where people use the
internet to contribute in meaningful ways to a wide range of scientific
challenges. Tasks are conducted entirely online, with participants
analysing data that is provided by scientists, rather than collecting data
themselves. Participants can take part in the comfort of their own home,
or while on the move with lap-tops, mobile devices and an internet
connection. Online communities often form around these projects, giving
participants the opportunity to interact and collaborate with other citizen
scientists or with the professional scientists managing the project.

Thousands of people
take part in these projects, yet there is very little research that explores
why people contribute - sometimes for many hours a day, and sometimes over a
period of several years. My research focuses on
what motivates and sustains participation in different types of online citizen
project, and how participants may collaborate with each other. I am
investigating three different projects: Foldit (www.fold,it); Planet Hunters (www.zooniverse.org); and
Folding@home (http://folding.stanford.edu) using online
surveys, interviews, and through participant observation. Preliminary results
suggest that participants take part in these projects because they want to make
a contribution to scientific research , they have a background interest in
science, or have a personal interest or stake in the outcome of the
research. However, motivations do vary between projects.

I will present some
of my findings, and also discuss some of the demographic characteristics of
these groups of citizen scientists.

Arnaud Vincent

Krabott – Algorithmic
trading is just a game for all

Pietro Panzarasa

Simmelian brokerage and social capital: Reconciling
social cohesion and structural holes

In the
social sciences, the debate over the structural foundations of social capital
has long vacillated between two positions on the relative benefits associated
with two types of social structures: closed structures, rich in third-party
relationships, and open structures, rich in structural holes and brokerage
opportunities. On the one hand, proponents of the benefits of closed structures
draw on the idea that social cohesion sustains trust, a sense of belonging,
cooperative behaviour, the enforcement of social norms, and the creation of a
common culture. On the other, advocates of the value of open structures
emphasise the information and control benefits that actors can extract from brokering
between otherwise disconnected others. We engage with this debate by focusing
on the measures with which the two conceptions of social capital have
traditionally been formalised: clustering and effective size. While clustering
has typically been used for measuring the extent to which a node is embedded
within a closed cohesive structure, effective size is a measure for detecting
the non-redundancy of a node's contacts, and therefore the degree to which the
node's local neighbourhood is rich in structural holes. We show that clustering
and effective size are simply two sides of the same coin, as they can be
expressed one in terms of the other through a simple functional relation.
Drawing upon this relation, and in qualitative agreement with the organisational
literature on Simmelian ties, we then develop a novel measure - Simmelian
brokerage - for detecting a generative mechanism of social capital that lies at
the interface between closed and open structures. Being sensitive not only to
the number of links in a node's local network, but also to variations in the
position of links across local networks of the same density, Simmelian
brokerage captures opportunities of brokerage between otherwise disconnected
groups of densely interconnected nodes. By detecting the extent to which a node
belongs to multiple groups that are tightly knit and disconnected from each
other, Simmelian brokerage dovetails with the idea that multiple
group-affiliations enable a node to extract social capital from the underlying
structure by blending social cohesion with structural holes. Implications of
our findings for research on social capital and complex networks are discussed.

Studies regarding
Wikipedia have been focused on the documents' hyperlink network or the edit
history of the articles. An approach to collect information about and
understand users' browsing behavior on the knowledge-space of Wikipedia will be
presented.